The Charnel-House The Trotskyists Geoffrey HellmanThe New YorkerDecember 16, 1939. The political group familiarly known either as the Trotskyists of the Trotskyites is officially called the Socialist Workers Party. A lot of its members feel this name is confusing, since the Party has just about as little patience with the Socialists as it has with …

Yesterday at Brown University, scholars and artists met for an afternoon symposium about “Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Visual Culture”:

In Nadim Damluji’s presentation — “The Violence of Localizing Western Comics for Arab Children” — he began with a slide boiling down recognizably (North) American, European, and Japanese comics. There might well have been a fourth slot on the slide with “Arab” and a question mark over it.

Damluji said that when he first began investigating Arabic comics, he saw two distinct periods in production: An early period where distinctly Arab comics were being produced and a shift in the 1960s to translated works. Damluji said that his view has changed, and that he nows sees an exchange between Arab and translated comics, noting for instance a “resistance in translation” when it came to Samir’s translation of racist moments in Tintin. But he still said that we “can’t escape the fact…

Cybertopia – Dreams of Silicon ValleyTragically this sort of techno pipe-dream of escaping/circumventing the need for the daily grinds of politics is common to most philosophers/theorists, who would like to substitute some logic (or experience) for people as they are.